SENATOR JV Ejercito said Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III could have asserted his position as president of the PDP-Laban on the issue concerning his family’s political rival—the Zamora family—in San Juan joining the ruling party.
Asked if he believed Pimentel was pressured into accepting San Juan City Rep. Ronaldo Zamora and his son, former vice mayor Francis Zamora, to the party, Ejercito replied: “I don’t think so, but I think he can assert because he is the head of the party.”
He said PDP should protect allies and supporters who have been with them since the start and not those who came into the picture only after Duterte won the presidency,
“It was Sen. Joel [Villanueva] who first had the same problem… I think it’s happening all over that the PDP were giving in to rival groups and and that might be a problem come election time,” he said Friday.
Ejercito said he was now having second thoughts about joining PDP-Laban whose chairman is President Rodrigo Duterte.
“The father and son entered (PDP-Laban), perhaps, throught the Speaker, but it’s sad because those who truly worked hard for PDP…now were being sidestepped,” said Ejercito while referrng to the party’s secretary-general House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez as behind the entry of the Zamoras to the PDP.
The Zamoras took their oath a month after the Commission on Elections approved their petition for recall against Ejercito’s mother, San Juan City Mayor Guia Gomez.
Gomez narrowly defeated Francis Zamora in the 2016 mayoralty elections with a margin of 1,224 votes.
Ejercito has accused the Zamoras of using public funds to get signatures in the recall election.
Ejercito noted that the Zamoras backed the candidacy of Sen. Grace Poe in the 2016 elections, then shifted their support to Duterte after he won the presidency.
“They appeared to be real supporters. They even had their pcitures taken with (PDP officials.) But the whole San Juan knows they are not really supporters of the President and they’re not really PDP. They’re really trapo (traditional politicians),” he added
He said Pimentel had been trying to get him to join the party for a long time, and that he had actually thought about resigning from his present political party —the Partido ng Masang Pilipino.
He said he was only waiting for the right time as well as the go signal from his father, former president and now Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada.
“We already had talks. Pimentel knows it’s only about timing. But the Speaker could have elbowed him [Pimentel. I don’t know what happened,” Ejercito said.